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THE 



CAUSES OF GERMANY'S 
MORAL DOWNFALL 



ROBERT JAMES HUTCHEON 



GERMANY'S 
MORAL DOWNFALL 



THE CAUSES 



OF 



GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 



ROBERT JAMES HUTCHEON 




THE BEACON PRESS 
25 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts 



J5 



16 



H« 



Copyright 19 19 
THE BEACON PRESS 



All rights reserved 



?Cf.A5l2284 

FEB 10 !9I9 



FOREWORD 

THE following lectures were delivered in Meadville, 
Pa., on the live Sundays from November 17 (1918) 
to December 15. They were inspired by the wide public 
interest in the overthrow of Germany by the Allied na- 
tions after more than four years of terrible and uncertain 
warfare. Many of those who heard them felt that the 
speaker had succeeded in giving a well-balanced statement 
of the good and evil of the German system, and expressed 
the hope that they might be published and reach a wider 
audience. 

With the exception of half a dozen additional pages, 
they are published as they were spoken. The writer 
does not pretend to any originality nor to any personal 
knowledge of Germany except such as one gets from hur- 
ried travel. The only merit of his lectures, if they have 
any at all, is the effort to understand before condemning, 
and to set the Germany which has given such mortal 
offence to the world over against the older and more 
idealistic Germany. 

The lectures were delivered in the first place not to 
scholars but to the general public, and their usefulness 
in printed form will be for the general reader only. It 
is the writer's conviction that we owe it to our loyal Ger- 
man-American friends and fellow-citizens to be discrim- 
inating in our condemnation of their ancestral home. 
Our case against the Germany of the last few years is 
so strong that we do not weaken it, but rather strengthen 
it, by trying to see by what aberrations that Germany 
came to be. 

ROBERT J. HUTCHEON. 
Meadville;, Pa., 1919. 



Iv] 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



How Fai.se: Ideas Ruinkd Germany . . . 
How Prosperity Ruined Germany . . . 
How Organization Failed Germany . . 
Why Education did not Save Germany . 
Why the Church did not Save Germany 



PAGE 

I 

9 

21 

44 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL 
DOWNFALL 



HOW FALSE IDEAS RUINED GERMANY 

NO single mind could possibly grasp the complete sig- 
nificance of the mighty events which in the last few 
months have convulsed and changed the European world. 
So many races are involved, so many dynasties have been 
overthrown, so many new democracies have come into 
being, so many new social forces have been liberated, 
that the commentator on the great drama can do little 
more than utter exclamations of wonder and surprise. 
Events of a similar nature have occurred in the past but 
never on so large a scale, and never has the news of them 
come upon the world with such overwhelming volume 
and suddenness as in the last few weeks. 

There would be interest and value, undoubtedly, in 
discussing the significance of the fall of any one of the 
overthrown dynasties and governments, but the one that 
has most significance and interest is that of Germany. No 
other dynasty in modern Europe has been as successful, 
as powerful, as deeply intrenched in the life of the people, 
as confident of its God-given mission and its glorious 
destiny, as the House of Hohenzollern. For nearly five 
hundred years the Hohenzollerns have been masters in 
Berlin, Brandenburg, growing Prussia, and lately in a 
united Germany; during that time they have produced 
some of the most masterful rulers that modern Europe 
has known ; step by step they have built up the most 
powerful economic, political, educational, and military 
system that any ruler has ever had under his sway, and 
yet the last and most arrogant monarch of the whole line 
is now a fugitive from the country of his ancestors, the 

[i] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

five-hundred-year period of their reign has come to a 
sudden and overwhelming close, and the family name is 
held up to scorn and derision by the whole civilized world. 
No later than last March, April, and May, it seemed as 
though the ambition of the Hohenzollerns to rule the 
world was going to be realized. The arrogance, religious 
fanaticism, and personal egotism of the Kaiser were at 
their highest; the German military caste and indeed a 
very large proportion of the German people were experi- 
encing a very delirium of joy; for the moment they were 
at the top of the world. But six months have brought a 
most dramatic and terrible reversal of their fortunes. 
Then the name of the Hohenzollerns was one to be ap- 
plauded by their friends and feared by their enemies ; now 
scarcely any one can be found to do it reverence. It is 
a reversal so colossal that the imagination is overpowered 
by it, thinking is almost paralyzed by emotion, and speech 
becomes little more than stammering and stuttering. 

Under these circumstances I am well aware that I can- 
not discuss with complete objectivity and clarity the five 
themes on which I have undertaken to speak. But I have 
felt that it might be worth while to make the attempt. 
What I wish to do is not to hold up to your horrified 
gaze the sins and crimes of Germany. Rather I want to 
inquire how an admittedly great and capable people came 
to acquire the mentality out of which this war with all 
its horrors has issued. 

The easy solution of this problem with which so many 
are satisfied, viz., that the Germans are by nature a cruel 
and brutal race, will not do. In recent years the word 
**race" has almost lost its meaning. Of course there are 
distinctions between so-called races as there are distinc- 
tions between persons, but no races are by nature bad 
while other races are by nature good. Races are the 
product not merely of physical heredity but of environ- 
ment and training and social inheritance, and any race, 
however good its start may be, may be transformed and 
coarsened by a change of environment and the constant 

[2] 



HOW FALSE IDEAS RUINED GERMANY 

pressure of a brutalizing influence. From the point of 
view of race, if we allow the word to carry us back for 
five hundred or a thousand years, the Germans are prob- 
ably little better or little worse than ourselves. The an- 
cestors of many of us came from Germany in the fifth 
century a.d., if not later, and brought with them pretty 
much the same human nature which in Germany has re- 
cently blossomed in the terrible doctrine and practice 
of f rightfulness in war. We must not let the word "race" 
put us on the wrong track, or flatter ourselves that we are 
forever protected against similar excesses by a finer and 
purer racial strain. 

No ! the main trouble with Germany has been, not a bad 
ancestry, but wrong ideas ! The ruthlessness, the cruelty, 
the fiendish excesses, the reckless ambitions, which Ger- 
many has exhibited to a horrified world in the last four 
years have not been the product of animal nature. No 
animals ever indulge in such excesses. The Germans 
have been ruthless in this war for the same reason that 
religious fanatics have always been ruthless in the re- 
ligious wars of the past. Religion, when it has taken to 
the sword, has always been extremely cruel, because the 
doctrines for which religious people went to war upset the 
balance of animal instinct, blunted the natural sympathies, 
got inside the reason, and betrayed men against them- 
selves. The natural passions of human nature are raised 
to the nth power when men persuade themselves that in 
their terrible cruelties they are doing God service. Man 
bedevilled by frightful doctrines is far more brutal than 
an animal can be. 

It is not hard to discover some of the particular ideas 
that have upset the balance of the German nature, — such 
as the idea that might is right, that the State is above the 
moral law, that treaties are only scraps of paper, that 
the end justifies the means, etc. But it is more difficult 
and more necessary to formulate in clear language the 
general state of mind of which these ideas are natural 
outgrowths. The rain falls from definite and clearly out- 
La] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

lined clouds which we can see in the sky above us, but 
the clouds are formed out of general atmospheric condi- 
tions which the eye cannot apprehend. So definite ideas 
often arise out of moods of mind that are saturated with 
feeling and vague desire and half -blind hope and irreso- 
lute volition. Hence to understand Germany we must 
know something of the dominant mood of the German 
mind for the last two or three decades. 

Germany as a nation has been for several years back 
in a mood which is more or less familiar to us in a certain 
type of young man. Picture to yourself a young man of 
powerful physical structure, his muscles tingling with 
excess of vitality, his brain fermenting with daring ideas, 
his imagination seething with visions of achievement, 
his will clamoring for self-assertion and power. Place 
such a young man in an old community where life has 
settled down into grooves, where social relations are 
regulated by custom, moral and religious scruples and 
traditions, where the frank self-assertion of the young 
person is snubbed and repressed by the rebukes of the 
older and wiser, where the past presents itself at every 
turn and asks youth to sit at its feet, to imbibe its wis- 
dom and guide life by its experience. Can you not 
imagine our young man, dowered as I have described him, 
rising up in headlong revolt against such a community? 
"What care I," he cries, "for these old notions about sex- 
relationship ? My own passionate need sets the law for 
me, not the custom of the community. Why should I 
with my ambition for wealth and achievement limit myself 
by the musty old conventions of the business world? 
When the people around me are evidently my inferiors 
in energy and ambition and brain power, why should I be 
constantly thinking about their so-called rights and 
scruples? When the future, as sketched by my eager 
imagination, stretches out before me in such dazzling 
splendor and I feel in my will the power to realize it all, 
why should I sit at the feet of the past or pay heed to 
those older men who pretend to summarize and report 

[4] 



HOW FALSE IDEAS RUINED GERMANY 

the lessons of its experience?" "Away with it all," he 
sometimes cries ; '*1 will have none of it. The law of my 
life is found in my own desires and powers of achieve- 
ment. I will achieve the completest realization of my 
needs and capacities whosesoever's rights and scruples are 
trampled on. I will vent my hitherto pent-up energies on 
the world. I will live and enjoy and achieve. I will burst 
these ancient community bonds, cast off all sentimentali- 
ties and pieties and conventions, and be a real man to the 
utmost boundaries of my natural power." 

Now, so far as I can formulate it by an illustration, that 
is the mood which for some decades back has been grow- 
ing in Germany and which has finally issued in the im- 
moral ambitions and the cruel excesses of the great war. 
The German people 'had a sense of immense power ; 
daring and romantic thinkers had filled their minds with 
vast speculative and overreaching ideas ; for the first time 
in centuries they had achieved an exalted place among the 
nations of the earth ; their imagination was dazzled by the 
pictures which the Pan-Germans were painting of their 
future destiny; their will-to-power and to self-assertion 
grew more clamorous with each new success of their na- 
tional life. And yet, as the young man found himself a 
citizen of an old community which demanded respect for 
its rights and scruples, so this essentially young nation 
found itself surrounded by older nations and its actions 
hampered by old treaties and scruples and so-called na- 
tional rights. A solemn treaty prevented an invasion of 
Belgium. A Hague Tribunal demanded the submission 
of international difficulties to an International Court. The 
conscience of the world protested against a war for which 
no valid excuse could be offered. On all sides the limitless 
ambitions and energies of Germany were met by limits 
laid down by the past and by the rights and necessities 
of other nations. 

But the fever in her blood would not abate. Her brain 
fermented more and more with daring and romantic ideas. 
Reckless men like von Bernhardi tempted her ambition 

[5] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

by showing her what she must do to win world power. 
The poUticians of the more astute Bismarckian tradition 
died or dropped out of sight. The megalomaniac Kaiser 
filled the imagination of the people even more completely. 
Their self-delusion grew and grew until it increased al- 
most to the proportions of national insanity, and at last, in 
the summer of 19 14, the whole nation burst the bonds of 
reserve, hurled itself in a mad paroxysm of energy on 
the world, threw aside treaties and Hague conventions as 
so many scraps of paper, gave way to a veritable orgy of 
cruelty and frightfulness, challenged the older world to 
a colossal trial by combat, and risked all to achieve its 
ambition of world power. The terrible war of the last 
four years was not the product, as it were, of a cynical 
old age or of a Turkish Sultan, steeped in cruelty him- 
self and the heir of a tradition of cruelties centuries old. 
It was the product of the heady dreams of youth, of an 
ambition fed up on big, romantic, crazy ideas, of a sense 
of strength that blindly felt itself to be invincible. 

Perhaps no man in Germany has been talking sounder 
sense during the last year or so than Maximilian Harden. 
But this is what he said in the earlier months of the war : 
"One principle only is to be reckoned with — one which 
sums up and includes all others — force! Boast of that 
and scorn all twaddle! Force! that is what rings loud 
and clear; that is what has distinction and fascination! 
Force — the fist — that is everything! Let us drop our 
pitiable efforts to excuse Germany's action; let us cease 
heaping contemptible insults upon the enemy. Not 
against our will were we thrown into this gigantic adven- 
ture. It was not imposed on us by surprise. We willed 
it ; we were bound to will it. We do not appear before 
the tribunal of Europe ; we do not recognize any such 
jurisdiction. Our force will create a new law in Europe. 
It is Germany that strikes. When it shall have con- 
quered new fields for its genius, then the priests of all the 
Gods will exalt the war as blessed!" 

There you have just such a speech as I tried to put 

[6] 



HOW FALSE IDEAS RUINED GERMANY 

into the mouth of my imaginary young man a few 
moments ago. Nothing could express more completely 
the mood which has been growing up in the soul of Ger- 
many since 1870. Bismarck would have disowned it, 
eager as he was for German advancement. Only a man 
like the last Kaiser — vain, over-fanciful, superficial, and 
reckless — would have encouraged such a mood in his 
people. And out of that mood have grown all the doc- 
trines that have seemed so hateful to us in the last four 
years — the doctrine that might is right, that treaties are 
not binding if they conflict with expediency, that the State 
is above all law, etc. The cruelties of Germany have been 
just as terrible in their results as the cruelties of Turkey, 
but they have had a different origin. The Turk has been 
a murderer by trade for many centuries. The German has 
not. His crimes against humanity have been the result 
of a fanatical, nationalistic cult which for the time being 
has upset completely the balance of his nature. A false 
idea has got inside his mind and betrayed him against 
himself. 

Wherein, then, consists the essential crime of Germany 
and her lesson to the world for all time ? Her crime con- 
sists in her attempt to cast aside all the moral experience 
of the past, cut herself off morally from humanity, and 
re-establish in human life, so far as international relations 
are concerned, the law of the jungle, which all human 
civilization has striven to outgrow. That is what has 
made her mentality so difficult for us to understand and 
what has made her underestimate, so fatally to herself, 
the strength of the moral forces of humanity. She treated 
the world's respect for treaty obligations as so much 
hypocrisy. She was so convinced that America cared for 
nothing but dollars that she took the last fatal step that 
roused the moral nature of the American people to its 
depths and compelled the Government to declare war. She 
laughed at the conventions of the Hague Tribunal, which 
aimed at the humanizing of war and which she herself 
had signed, and declared that the German State recog- 

[7] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

nized no law but her own necessity. Every act of Ger- 
many since the war began showed that she recognized 
no European or human tribunal; that she believed that 
the old moral world was dead ; that she set aside as mean- 
ingless the humane ethical code of Christianity; that she 
proposed to make a new moral law and to begin a new 
kind of world on the ruins of the old. 

But the result has shown that Germany was mistaken. 
The past moral experience of humanity cannot be set 
aside so easily. The pieties and respectabilities and con- 
ventions and moralities of the past may need revision and 
transformation, but they cannot be cast to one side as 
useless and meaningless traditions. No one nation can 
ever be powerful enough — at least the last three months 
have shown that Germany has not been powerful 
enough — to change the deep trend of human life on this 
earth in the direction of co-operation, interdependence, 
and a universal moral law. Germany aimed at a Roman 
peace — a peace wherein one powerful nation disarms all 
other nations and keeps all the weapons in her own hands. 
In such a peace there is no real human interdependence, 
but only master and slaves. But she has achieved the 
very opposite of what she intended — her violence has ac- 
celerated the movement of humanity towards co-operation 
and internationalism. A League of Nations is now within 
sight even though its organization is yet to be achieved. 
The submarines, Zeppelins, and bombing planes which 
were to have been the weapons for the destruction of the 
old world and the founding of the new are being sur- 
rendered by their creators. The romantic overreaching 
dream of Germany has come to a hideous end. The es- 
sential soundness of the old humanities and moralities 
has been revindicated. Imperial Germany is a thing of 
the past, and henceforth its main function will be to point 
a moral for those young nations or young persons who 
dream that the world begins for the first time with them 
and that the old past need not be consulted or revered by 
those who are eagerly pressing towards the opening 
future. jg3 



HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY 

MODERN Germany, which has been accurately de- 
scribed as '*an extended Prussia" and which was 
mainly the creation of Bismarck, began its dazzling but 
ultimately disastrous career with a background of bitter 
and humiliating memories. No nation can soon forget 
such a humiliation as Prussia suffered in the decade from 
1797 to 1807. As Queen Luise said, Prussia had fallen 
asleep upon the laurels of Frederick the Great. Twenty 
years after the death of that monarch, Napoleon inflicted 
upon the Prussian army at Jena a defeat which was al- 
most equal to annihilation, for it so destroyed their morale 
that fortress after fortress surrendered to the French 
conqueror without a struggle. No less humiliating was 
the insolent contempt shown by Napoleon towards the 
House of Hohenzollern and the symbols of its great- 
ness. As a recent English historian tells us : "With his 
own hands he desecrated the tomb of Frederick the Great 
at Potsdam, and sent off his sword and scarf to the In- 
valides ; he scrawled obscene insults against the Queen 
Luise on the walls of her own palace ; he demolished the 
obelisk on the battlefield of Rossbach ; he carried off to 
Paris the figure of Victory from the Brandenburg gate 
and drove the Prussian guards like cattle down Unter 
den Linden." His last insult was to keep Frederick 
William, the Prussian king, waiting on the banks of the 
river Niemen, while he and the Russian Czar Alexander 
decided Prussia's fate in a pavilion erected on a raft 
moored in the middle of the river. 

With the reorganization of Prussia by Stein, Scharn- 
horst, Gneisenau and Humboldt after 1807 and the res- 
toration of her morale by the War of Liberation ending 
with the Prussian share of the glory of Waterloo, the 
humiliation of 1797-1807 lost something of its sting. But 

[9] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

success was long in coming even after the overthrow of 
Napoleon. Politically the Prussian kings were dominated 
by the masterful personality of Metternich, Austria's re- 
actionary leader. Economically and commercially Ger- 
many was the most backward country in Western Europe 
during the first half of the nineteenth century. "The 
country as a whole had not yet emerged from the agrarian 
stage ; the exports were mainly raw products ; the mines 
were almost entirely unworked; manufactures were still 
produced by the hand-looms and spinning-wheels of do- 
mestic workers. Nowhere were duties uniform. Al- 
together there were 67 different tariffs, embracing no less 
than 3,800 categories of goods." 

The memories and assets which Prussia took with her 
into the second half of the nineteenth century were there- 
fore not such as to flatter her vanity or stimulate her am- 
bition. The military glories of Frederick the Great's 
reign had been almost obliterated by the disasters of the 
Napoleonic wars. The three kings who followed him, 
however amiable they may have been, had won no prestige 
for Prussia in the outside world. The liberal movements, 
which had been so promising during the War of Libera- 
tion, lost their impetus as the years passed, and finally 
were overthrown in the failure of the Revolution of 1848. 
Before the coming of Bismarck in 1862, Prussia had 
achieved considerable success and influence through the 
Zollverein, but still the mood and disposition of her people 
were dominated by bitter memories, economic poverty, 
divided counsels, and a none too hopeful outlook for the 
future. 

This gray background must be kept clearly in view if 
we are to understand how Prussia's subsequent success 
and prosperity turned her head. 

Standing as we do at the close of the great war and 
looking at the ruins of the German Empire, we can see 
now that the dazzling successes of the decade from i860 
to 1870 were the greatest misfortunes Germany has ever 
experienced, but they did not seem so at the time to the 

[10] 



HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY 

Germans or to any one else. Those victories were the 
result of no lucky accident or favorable set of circum- 
stances. They were the reward of the most deliberate, 
painstaking, and intelligent preparation. Every weapon 
which the able, unscrupulous, and iron-willed Bismarck 
could command was pressed into service — intrigue, pre- 
varication, appeals to selfish motives, and especially force 
to the uttermost. 

But, however honorable or dishonorable the weapons 
used, the end gained was so dazzling that Germany and 
the larger portion of the outside world along with her 
forgot the means and thought only of the end. We who 
have felt in the last few months the tremendous exalta- 
tion of victory, following on the heels of a terrible and 
soul-quaking defeat, can easily imagine how the Germans 
must have felt when on January i8, 1871, King William 
of Prussia was acclaimed German Emperor, in the Hall 
of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. It was the one 
hundred and seventieth anniversary of the day on which 
Frederick, Elector of Brandenburg, had assumed at 
Konigsberg the kingly crown of Prussia, and in those 
one hundred and seventy years Prussia had grown from 
two small bits of territory, one around Berlin and the 
other around Konigsberg, into the mightiest power in 
Europe. From the dizzy heights of 1871 the Prussians 
could look back, not merely on these one hundred and 
seventy years of checkered fortunes, but also, as must be 
carefully noted, on six years of the most successful war- 
fare that any country had carried on since the Napoleonic 
period. In 1864 they had, with the help of Austria, de- 
feated Denmark and wrested from her the provinces of 
Schlesv/ig and Holstein. In 1866 they had defeated Aus- 
tria in a Seven Weeks' War, ending with the overwhelm- 
ing victory at Sadowa, and thus secured the leadership 
and, as it ultimately proved, the mastery of Germany for 
the Hohenzollerns. Finally, in less than six months, in 
1870 they overthrew and inflicted a humiliating peace 
upon the most brilliantly successful military nation of 

[11] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

modern Europe — the French. The victory of Sedan over 
the French in 1870, when Napoleon III and 80,000 men 
were taken prisoners, set the joy-bells ringing throughout 
all Prussia and must have taken much of the sting out 
of their memory of the terrible defeat which Napoleon 
I had inflicted on them at Jena in 1806. 

Now, if we keep in view the mood of mind in which 
Prussia entered upon this wonderful decade in her his- 
tory, — a mood of defeatism, surly discouragement and 
reactionism, — it will not be difficult for us to under- 
stand the effect upon Prussian mentality of these triumph- 
ant and unexpected successes. Whoever has visited Ber- 
lin and studied the monuments which celebrate these great 
successes can read the inmost thoughts and feelings of 
the people. A veritable intoxication of joy in victory 
utters itself in these monuments. After decades of humil- 
iation, unsuccess, and half -blind groping, a stupendous 
triumph had come to them, and, throwing aside all re- 
serve and restraint, they abandoned themselves to a 
tempest of emotion and to the glorification of force, and 
of themselves as the true wielders of force, the true 
descendants of Thor, the god of force. All that sys- 
tematic, collective self-praise in which Germany has in- 
dulged in recent decades and which seems so childish to 
the rest of the world, all that ''aggregated and organized 
egotism," as it has been called, which has shown itself 
stark naked and unashamed since August, 19 14, all that 
sense of superiority to everybody else which has been 
for a long time the daily atmosphere of the Prussian of- 
ficer, scholar, and business man, — this whole half-childish 
and half-diseased state of mind has grown, naturally 
enough, out of the abnormal mental exhilaration and the 
exaggerated self-consciousness which followed on the 
sudden and spectacular successes of the decade from i860 
to 1870. The wine of success, to a people who had not 
tasted more than a sip of it for three generations, proved 
to be extremely intoxicating in its effects. 

But other causes for self-glorification were soon added 

[12] 



HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY 

to military successes. Whoever will take the trouble to 
compare the economic condition of Germany in 1870 with 
that in 1910 will become aware of a mighty transforma- 
tion. Never before has so large a population been in- 
dustrialized and thereby made immensely wealthy in so 
short a time. Test the development of the country in 
any way you like and the result will always be the same. 

Take population, for example. In 1871, the population 
of the Empire was 41,000,000; in 1890, it was 49,500,000; 
in 1900, it was 56,250,000; and in 191 1, it had grown to 
65,000,000. In 191 2, the annual surplus of births over 
deaths was 839,887. 

Or take the growth of towns, which is always indicative 
of industrial development. In 1871, Germany had eight 
large cities of over 100,000 inhabitants ; in 1880, the num- 
ber was 14; in 1890, 26; in 1895, 30; in 1900, 33; in 
1905, 41 ; and in 1910, 48. Of these 48, 6 had more than 
half a million, and 17 over a quarter of a million inhabi- 
tants. 

Or take the statistics of foreign trade. In 1880, the im- 
ports were valued at £141,000,000, the exports at £144,- 
800,000. By 1907, the imports were £443,000,000 and the 
exports £356,000,000. By 19 13, the imports had increased 
to £534,750,000 and the exports to £495,630,000. In other 
words, though the population had increased by only 60 
per cent., the total volume of trade had increased almost 
fourfold. 

Or, finally, take the record of shipping. **In 187 1, Ger- 
man shipping was 892,000 tons and her share of the mer- 
cantile marine of the world was 5.2 per cent. ; in 1905, 
she had 2,200,000 tons of shipping, representing 9.9 per 
cent, of the world's mercantile marine. In 191 3, her ton- 
nage had risen to over 5,000,000 tons and Germany had 
the second place in the shipping of the world." 

I take all these figures from W. H. Dawson's authori- 
tative book on Modern Germany, so that you may take 
them as telling an authentic story. 

And that story testifies to a prodigious effort and an 

[13] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

equally prodigious success. Apart from the United States 
of America, where conditions have been altogether differ- 
ent, the economic development of Germany in the last 
forty years has been the economic romance of the period, 
if you can apply the word "romance" to a movement 
which draws its strength from the instinct of acquisition, 
one of man's least ideal motives. Germany's ships were 
anchored in all the harbors, and her goods were sold in 
all the markets of the world. In certain important indus- 
tries she outdistanced all her rivals and in two or three 
had the world's market almost to herself. And this trade 
was more than a source of profit and pride to individual 
Germans. The German Government did everything pos- 
sible to foster it; the German nation felt its prestige in- 
creased by it ; the imagination of all Germans was fed up 
on the glorious story of it. 

Finally, to military and economic successes must be 
added an immense increase of Germany's prestige in the 
educational and musical w^orlds. She was the Mecca of 
students from all over the world, oriental as well as occi- 
dental. No one's academic culture was supposed to be 
complete without a year or so in Germany. Ambitious 
young musicians almost invariably wanted to study with a 
German master. The German language and German books 
were becoming increasingly known wherever people had 
any eager interest in modern civilization. 

All in all, the German people during the fifty years from 
i860 to igio achieved a success which not only dazzled 
their own imaginations, increased immensely their self- 
respect, and intensified their self-consciousness, but also 
bewildered the other nations of the world with amaze- 
ment and, to a certain extent, inspired in them a feeling 
of envy and a sense of fear. 

Now, what was the effect of all this success and pros- 
perity upon the mentality of Germany herself? We 
know how individuals have their heads turned by sudden 
and immense prosperity, how they become arrogant and 
domineering, how they gradually isolate themselves from 

[14] 



HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY 

their old friends through a growing sense of superiority, 
and how a hard worldly tone often takes the place of their 
old sympathy and spirituality. Is a whole nation liable 
to such spiritual degeneration ? The life of Germany for 
the last fifty years shows that it is. 

Consider, for example, that sense of superiority to 
which I have already referred. Listen to the following 
characteristic utterances and see if they do not speak to 
you of abnormality and of a megalomania on the highroad 
to insanity. Hear the Kaiser in 1905 : "God would never 
have taken such great pains with our German Fatherland 
and its people, if He had not been preparing us for some- 
thing still greater. We are the salt of the earth. The 
German people is the granite block on which the good God 
will complete his work of civilizing the world." Or hear 
Ludwig Woltmann : "The entire European civilization, 
even in Slav and Latin countries, is the work of the Teu- 
tonic race. The Teutons are the aristocracy of humanity. 
Whosoever has the characteristics of the Teutonic race is 
superior. The cultural value of a nation is measured by 
the quantity of Teutonism it contains." Or hear Fritz 
Bley : "We are beyond all doubt the first of all the nations 
of the world as warriors. We are the most capable nation 
in every field of science and in every branch of the fine 
arts. We are the best colonists, the best mariners, and 
even the best merchants." Or hear the notorious Cham- 
berlain : "The higher culture of humanity depends on the 
diffusion of the German language. People must learn that 
any one who cannot speak German is a pariah." Or hear 
von Bernhardi : "The Germans are the greatest civilized 
people known to history." Or, finally, hear the aged 
Berlin philosopher Lasson : "Our Emperor, our Chancel- 
lor, our leading men, like our people, have no equals. We 
are the freest people of the earth. Our might is the 
might of the spirit. Humaneness, gentleness, conscien- 
tiousness, Christianity, are our distinguishing marks." 

W^hat is the inner meaning of these and the hundreds 
of other similar utterances from distinguished Germans 

[15] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S AlORAL DOWNFALL 

that have been going the rounds of the newspapers and 
magazines in the last four years ? Surely they are the say- 
ings of men who have for the moment lost all contact 
with reality and the sense of perspective and proportion 
which generally goes with such contact. These men, how- 
ever great in other respects they may be, are the dupes 
of their own will to believe what they wish to believe. 
Imagination has usurped the functions of perception. 
They have nourished their souls so long on false and high- 
flown ideas that their power of self-criticism has perished. 
They do not see that self-praise is the mark of the child 
and the barbarian and that he who is really superior 
would never think of claiming that he is so. They have not 
prayed the prayer of Burns that they might see themselves 
as others see them. Their whole manner of thinking on 
general matters has been so deeply subjective, so pro- 
foundly inward, so vague, romantic, and speculative that 
they mistake their own inner wishes for outer facts and 
translate their desire for superiority into an objective real- 
ity which, they think, only the envious can deny. And 
when we see that this national chorus of self-praise is of 
comparatively recent origin, we may legitimately infer that 
it is the psychological product of an unwonted and colos- 
sal success and prosperity and will surely dwindle in vol- 
ume now that success and prosperity have been followed 
by military collapse and economic ruin. 

As a second psychological result of their success and 
prosperity, recall the well-known reaction of Modern 
Germany against the old idealism. During the war the 
spokesmen of Germany have declared ad nauseam that 
they were defending German idealism against Russian 
barbarism, French vanity and British materialism. But 
before the war other authoritative German spokesmen 
bemoaned the fact that idealism had been abandoned 
in the house of its so-called creators and friends. The 
ideas which found expression at the end of the eighteenth 
and the beginning of the nineteenth century in the phil- 
osophy of Kant, Herder, Fichte, and Hegel and in the 

[i6] 



HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY 



literature of Wieland, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe have 
little currency in Modern Germany. One thing alone 
is sufficient to test the standing of idealism in Modern 
Germany,— the degree to which the life and works of 
Schiller are preserved in the popular memory and mter- 
est. Schiller, better perhaps than any one else, represents 
German idealism at its best. He was as great as a man as 
he was as a writer. He had a passionate faith in an eternal 
ideal world. No more glowing picture of a romantic and 
popular struggle for liberty has ever been sketched than 
that of his Wilhelm Tell He had an ardent^ sympathy 
for all that was most humane and philosophically pro- 
found in the thought of the eighteenth century. His writ- 
ings, as well as the addresses of Fichte, helped to rekindle 
in Germany, after the period of disaster and humiliation 
from 1797 to 1807, a longing for a free and truly na- 
tional existence. A genuinely idealistic people would 
not let the memory of such a man die out. And yet, 
an able German literary critic, Ludwig Fulda, confessed 
a few years ago that Schiller was no longer appreciated 
in Germany as he had been four decades before. He 
says : "An extraordinary transformation has taken place 
in the intellectual life of Germany in politics, culture, and 
art; and it is easy to see how the new conditions and 
views in each of these domains unfavorably affect the 
appreciation of Schiller. Woe to everything in the Ger- 
many of to-day which bears the impress of ideahsm, 
for it is regarded as a relic of the epoch of political 
impotence, of the time when the Germans were as ideal- 
istic as the poet who came last in the division of the 
world." , 

And, as a crowning bit of evidence on this matter ot 
the standing of idealism in Modern Germany, hear what 
Dr. Fuchs says in 1912 in urging immediate war: "Who 
are the men whom the Germans love most ardently? 
Goethe, Schiller, Wagner, Marx? Oh, no! but rather 
Barbarossa, Frederick the Great, Blucher, Moltke, and 
Bismarck, the hard men of blood. It is to these men, 

[17] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

who sacrificed thousands of Hves, that the soul of the 
nation sends out its tenderest feelings and a truly adoring 
gratitude, because they did what we should do to-day." 

In these and many other similar utterances which might 
be c^uoted we have indisputable proof that, while Ger- 
many in the last fifty years has been dazzling herself and 
the rest of the world by her unexampled success and 
prosperity, she has been losing her soul. In days gone 
by she had been the home of a lofty idealism, an idealism 
that had sent mighty tides of influence over the whole 
modern world. But in the last three decades the leaders 
of intellectual life in Germany have for the most part 
forsaken the teaching of the great masters and becon^^ 
the exponents of a realism which the masters would 
have scornfully disowned. 

But the most astounding psychological result of Ger- 
man success and prosperity has still to be mentioned. We 
all know what greed is, for we have felt it in ourselves 
and witnessed it in the lives of others. In this new world 
we have known the greed of big business corporations in 
an aggravated form. The will-to-possess, our European 
critics have told us, stalks unashamed throughout our 
entire American life. Whether this criticism be well- 
founded or not, it is certainly true of us as of all peoples 
that the instinct of acquisition is one of the three or four 
strongest instincts whose impulse lies back of our daily 
conduct. 

But the will-to-possess which has found utterance in 
Germany in the last four years has a quality of unrestraint 
and shameless abandon which it has never displayed else- 
where on anything like so large a scale. Whoever has 
read the German-Swiss Grumbach's ^'Germany's Annexa- 
tionist Aims," as selected, translated, and arranged by J. 
Ellis Barker, will know how I arrive at such a judgment. 
We have here set forth in their own words the war-aims 
of the German business leaders, professors, socialists, uni- 
versity professors, journalists, leaders of political parties 
and official classes. Our magazines and newspapers have 

[i8] 



HOW PROSPERITY RUINED GERMANY 

made these aims known in part to their readers, but to 
read them consecutively, as we may, in Grumbach's book 
or in the more recent book of a similar character, "Out 
of Their Own Mouths," is to recoil with shame, horror, 
and fear from the revelation of how cruel and inhuman 
the ambition of a great people can become, when once 
their head has been turned by success and prosperity. 
They demand not merely political control of vast new 
territories, but the transfer of mines and industrial plants 
from hostile to German hands, the expropriation and de- 
portation of Belgian, French, and Russian landholders, 
and the reduction of all other inhabitants to a condition 
of political and industrial vassalage to Germany. Mindful 
of the trouble they had had with recalcitrant Poles and 
Alsatians, they decide to make such trouble impossible in 
their newly conquered territories by removing the most in- 
dependent portion of the population and colonizing the 
lands with real Germans. That which Norman Angell in 
his famous book "The Great Illusion" declared to be im- 
possible, viz., the expropriation and deportation of the 
people of a conquered country in the manner of the 
Canaanites or the Romans, many German leaders declared 
to be both possible and desirable. As some German 
critics of these war-aims (for there have been outspoken 
German critics) have said : "They constitute a programme 
for which no European precedent can be found since the 
migrations of the nations in the fifth and following cen- 
turies, when the Teutonic hordes first overran the civilized 
world." The lust for loot has here broken all human 
bounds and assumed proportions which both shock the 
conscience and stagger the imagination. Only a mighty 
people could sin on so large a scale, and only by a mighty 
effort can they purge themselves of the insane ambitions 
which success and prosperity engendered in their souls. 

Looking back, as we now can, from the end of the Grea" 
War, the whole world can see that it would have been 
better for Germany if the Franco-Prussian War had 
been a draw, for it was her spectacular success in that 

[19] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

war that overheated her brain and fired her soul with an 
overreaching ambition. And as long as the instinct of 
acquisition continues strong in human nature, so long will 
the history of Germany for the last forty years be a warn- 
ing to individuals and to nations. Sudden success and 
prosperity tend to disturb the balance of human nature, 
and, since the corruption of the best is always the worst, 
a great people, when they go astray, commit excesses of 
which a less powerful, a less imaginative, and a less 
ambitious people are incapable. 



[20] 



HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY 

NO type of man has been more in demand in modern 
times than the man with a genius for organization. 
The human race has become very numerous, human af- 
fairs are very compHcated, human enterprises have to 
be on a colossal scale, multitudes of men can be advan- 
tageously employed in one mammoth human undertak- 
ing, and so the individual who can organize human effort 
so that the work of many men fits together like the parts 
of a great machine is the man of the hour. 

No organizing genius with a gang of men could have 
produced Plato's "Dialogues" or Dante's "Divine Com- 
edy" or Shakespeare's dramas or Beethoven's symphonies 
or Raphael's paintings or Sir Walter Scott's novels. All 
such works are the product of individual spirits, working 
in solitude and expressing through the medium of their 
art their most personal reactions of thought and feeling 
and resolve to their experiences of life. No more could 
an organizing genius with a gang of men make great 
inventions or discover new scientific truths. Here again 
the intuition of the solitary, brooding, imaginative thinker 
is required. 

But when the invention has taken shape in the in- 
ventor's mind and the scientific truth has flashed through 
the imaginative reason of some Newton or Darwin or 
Kelvin or Lister or Mendeleeff or Pasteur, then the or- 
ganizing genius has his opportunity. He embodies the 
idea of the inventor in a machine and uses that machine 
to save human labor and increase production in manu- 
facture, industry, and transportation. He tests the truth 
of the scientific discoverer in wide fields of investiga- 
tion and by organizing research multiplies the value of 
the truth manyfold. The organizer is a creator of the 
second order, not of the first, but his work has such im- 

[21] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

mense practical value that in the modern world he has 
almost cast the inventor and creator into obscurity. To 
illustrate — after this country went into the war and had 
to do so many new and great things in a hurry, everything 
was at odds and ends until great organizers like Schwab 
and Ryan and Baruch and McAdoo were called into 
service. 

Now the classic land of method and organization in 
the last half-century has been Germany. Nowhere else 
have the worship and practice of efficiency been carried 
on so enthusiastically and successfully. Whatever has 
to be done by many men working together under careful 
and intelligent direction has been generally done better 
in Germany than anywhere else. Research in linguistics, 
archaeology and history, laboratory investigation in 
physics, chemistry, biology and psychology, the applica- 
tion of invention to war, industry and transportation, — 
for all these tasks Germany has an aptitude which no 
other modern nation has displayed to anything like the 
same degree. Those who are learned along these lines 
say that Germany is more successful in the application 
than in the discovery of principles. For example, it is 
contended that in the field of chemistry, where Germany 
has achieved such pre-eminence, none of the twenty-odd 
fundamental principles on which the science is based 
were discovered by Germans, and, again, that in the field 
of war-implements Germany has simply applied the in- 
ventions of Americans and Englishmen. But whatever 
be the truth in these matters, no one denies that in the 
field of research, investigation, and practical application 
the German has led the modern world. He has a patience 
for detail, a willingness to dig and delve in a narrow 
shaft, a power to work in harness, a sort of sublime in- 
difiference to monotony, a contentment with small gains, 
which have thus far been wanting in the other great 
peoples of to-day. 

We see this glorification of method and organization 
in Germany to whatever aspect of her life we direct our 

[22] 



HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY 

attention. Before August, 191 4, Germany was the most 
orderly, methodical, machine-like country in Europe or 
the world. I use the word ''machine-like" advisedly. 
From the point of view of their political institutions 
England and France have grown slowly and spontane- 
ously like any product of life. But Germany has been 
put together like the parts of a machine. As late as the 
end of the Napoleonic era, all Southern Germany and 
the Rhinelands were leagued with Napoleon against Prus- 
sia. As late as 1866 Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse, and Han- 
over were at war with Prussia. The separatist tendency 
which is manifesting itself so strongly in Germany to- 
day, in the hour of her defeat, is rooted in the fact 
that in 1870, when she was organized, the non-Prussian 
parts were not so much grafted on as clamped on to 
Prussia. Germany since 1870 has not been a naturally 
evolved and truly organic nation. She has been a po- 
litical and economic machine. Her parts have been well 
fitted together and the whole machine has been well oiled 
and has run with a minimum of friction; nevertheless, 
she has been held together by belts and bolts and screws 
and nails and clamps rather than by organic filaments. 
She has been the product, not so much of spontaneous 
nature, as of method, organization, logic, war, and an 
unscrupulous and far-seeing diplomacy. 

We see the same regard for method and organization 
in the contempt which the Germans felt for the British 
Empire before 1914. Their great historians and states- 
men had no idea that a scattered multitude of nations 
and peoples could be held together through a terrible war 
by an invisible bond of mere sentiment. They regarded 
the British Empire as an illogical, incoherent, decaying 
structure which would topple over when the storm of a 
great war beat upon it. They predicted freely that Can- 
ada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India 
would break away from the Empire rather than run the 
risk of being involved in its ruin. They saw that the 
British Empire had grown by chance and accident and 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

unforeseen events; that Great Britain without any spe- 
cial foresight or plan or design had stumbled into pos- 
session or control of territory all over the world; that 
no one systematic and logically-thought-out form of gov- 
ernment was in force throughout; that Britain did not 
attempt to impose her type of civilization on alien races, 
but allowed them to retain everything of their past that 
did not interfere with successful administration. And 
as they looked at the incoherent, endlessly diverse, ram- 
shackle Empire they honestly felt that with their love of 
order and method, their genius for designing plans and 
efficiency in carrying them out, and their habit of pro- 
ceeding from central and clearly-thought-out ideas, they 
could do far more for the civilization of the world if 
they possessed and administered the British colonies 
than Great Britain ever would. 

Again we see the same faith in and mastery of method 
and organization in the German preparation for this war. 
Long ago the German leaders persuaded themselves that 
war was inevitable, and they prepared for it in the 
most systematic way imaginable. They did not live from 
day to day as a less far-seeing people would have done, 
but looked far into the future and laid their plans for 
that far-away future. I do not mean merely that they 
prepared a great army and adjusted their industrial, finan- 
cial, agricultural, and transportation systems with a 
view to war. Of course they did all that, but that 
is the obvious thing for a government to do if it believes 
war to be inevitable. 

I refer to something less obvious. If a government is 
going to call upon its people to make a great sacrifice or 
run a great risk, it must make them feel that the cause 
for which they are to risk everything is worthy of the ut- 
most they have to give ; that is, it must prepare the people 
psychologically for the future. This Germany did in the 
most methodical manner. She filled the memories of her 
people with the glories of the past. The old legends 
and sagas and mythology, the story of Arminius who 

[24] 



HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY 

overcame the Romans in the Teutoburger Wald, the songs 
and poems commemorating the heroic deeds of the Ger- 
manic past, the victorious campaigns of Frederick the 
Great, the career of the House of HohenzoUern for 
five hundred years — everything out of the past that could 
fire the spirit of the German people with faith in the 
superiority and mission and great destiny of Germany 
was utilized in the most skilful way by those who had 
the education of Germany in charge. Most visitors to 
Berlin have doubtless laughed at the false history and the 
ostentatious pride in family which are revealed by the 
monuments of the famous Siegesallee, and no doubt 
from the point of view either of history or of art they 
deserve the laugh, but nevertheless those monuments have 
played their part in keeping the glories of the House of 
HohenzoUern before the German people and in filling 
the minds of the people with a sense of the greatness of 
Germany's past and the promise of Germany's future. 

And strangest of all evidences of the German use of 
method in preparing for this war is their doctrine of 
Schrecklichkeit, or frightfulness. Foreseeing the horrors 
of modern war, they prepared themselves for them by 
building up in their minds a theory concerning them. 
They created in their thought the belief that frightfulness 
has military value, that cruelty to civilian population will 
bring war more quickly to an end, that to inspire fear in 
your enemy by striking him with every conceivable 
weapon is ultimately more humane than to prolong the 
war by gentler methods, and, having conceived the doc- 
trine, they forced themselves, in the cases where a rein- 
forcing of natural cruelty was necessary, to carry it out 
in practice. The world has been horrified not merely 
that such things should be done in war, but especially 
that they should all be thought out, justified, and planned 
for in advance. The doctrine of frightfulness, no doubt, 
reveals an unexpected cruelty in the German nature, but 
it reveals just as certainly the tendency of the German 
mind to work out the theory of a thing first of all, and 

[25] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

then, having convinced itself of the logical soundness of 
the theory, to proceed to apply the theory in practice, un- 
appalled by the character of the consequences. 

Further instances of the German belief in and mastery 
of method and organization could be advanced if it 
were necessary. As Owen Wister showed in his little 
book "The Pentecost of Calamity," published early in 
the war, all Germany was a marvellous illustration of 
what method, organization and efficiency can do for the 
external ordering of the life and activities of a people. 
No traveller in Germany ever failed to observe it or to be 
attracted by it, unless he was psychologist enough, as 
most of us were not, to see beneath the smooth surface 
of German life down into the volcanic ambitions and 
lurid imaginings of the modern German soul. 

Now what has been the psychical result of all this 
worship of method and organization? It can be summed 
up in six words : Germany became blind to psychological 
values. In other words, Germany lost the key to the heart 
and mind of man. As W. H. Dawson, probably the most 
sympathetic English student of Germany in the last 
twenty years, puts it: '*So far as command over matter 
goes, the German is not merely good, but unapproachable. 
Any work, any function that can be performed by system, 
he will perform as no other man on earth. His machinery 
will work to perfection and the finished product will be 
the best of its kind — that is, the best that such machinery 
can produce. When, however, it comes to working with 
human material, the German system breaks down, for 
here machine-work is of little value." 

In these words we may find the secret of a great deal 
that we have been witnessing in Germany during the last 
forty and especially the last four years. Germany has 
known how to handle things, but not how to treat men 
and women. Things have no living will, and, once their 
physical and chemical laws are known, they can be manip- 
ulated to suit man's convenience and ambition. But hu- 

[26] 



HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY 

man beings are living wills. Each one is a personal centre 
of psychical being. Each one has desires and ambitions 
and hopes of a unique kind and sooner or later will resist 
all efforts to treat him merely as a thing. Method and 
organization can be applied without limit to things and 
animals, but inevitably break down when they are applied 
beyond a certain point to men and women. 

And it is just this breakdown that we have been wit- 
nessing in Prussia in the last forty years. As a ruler of 
alien races, whether Danes or Poles, the French of 
Alsace-Lorraine, or the dark peoples of their African 
colonies, the Prussians have made a dismal and disas- 
trous failure. They have not treated the men of such 
races as having natural rights to life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness, but as inferior beings who exist to 
be governed and who should find the only happiness they 
really need in serving and admiring the State that gov- 
erns them. They cannot understand why Danes, Poles, 
and French resist the Prussianizing process. It has not 
occurred to the Prussian bureaucrats that understanding, 
sympathy, and conciliation might have won their Danish, 
Polish, and French inhabitants when repression only 
hardened their wills against their rulers. They have sub- 
jected all these races to a system of espionage, petty an- 
noyance, and arrogant brutality, proscribing their lan- 
guage, hampering them in their economic life, treating 
them personally (as in the Zabern incident of 1913) in a 
cruelly repressive way, and, as a result of it all, they are 
more eager to escape from the clutches of Prussia to-day 
than they were forty years ago. If human beings could 
be moulded and manipulated as things are, Prussia ought 
to have succeeded in Poland and Alsace-Lorraine, for no 
government ever tried harder to apply system and method 
to human life than did Prussia. But she has miserably 
failed, and her failure ought to teach the world once for 
all that such an application of organization to human life 
must always fail. 

Germany's blindness to psychological values has been 

[27] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

exhibited, during the last four years of war, on a more 
colossal scale than ever before — hard as that may be to 
believe for those who know how she has treated Poland 
and Alsace-Lorraine. The German universities in the last 
half-century have been the source of the world's most 
modern type of psychology — the much-heralded experi- 
mental psychology. Whatever can be learned about the 
soul of man by means of the machinery of the psychologi- 
cal laboratory Germany has known. There is scarcely a 
teacher of Experimental Psychology anywhere in Amer- 
ica, unless one of the very youngest men, who has not 
studied under some German professor. And yet no other 
nation in the last four years has shown such ignorance 
of real psychology as has been displayed by Germany. 
She has used the machine method so long and so exclu- 
sively that what the rest of us would simply call the in- 
sight of common sense has completely failed her. She 
failed to see that her practice of frightfulness would not 
frighten her enemies, but simply lash their instinct of 
pugnacity into fury and raise their courage to the heights 
of a sublime fearlessness. She did not see that Zeppelin 
raids on defenceless country towns, cruiser-attacks on un- 
fortified watering-places, submarine piracy on the high 
seas, the horror of the Lusitania, the judicial murders 
of Edith Cavell and Captain Fryatt, the bombing of hos- 
pitals, the torpedoing of Red Cross ships, and all the other 
crimes of the last four years would only drive more 
Britishers to the recruiting-stations and ultimately bring 
America into the war. 

What is the meaning of all this blindness to facts 
about human nature which were quite patent to the rest 
of the world? I can see no explanation of it except the 
one I have given. Having made themselves masters 
of method, organization, and efficiency, the Germans have 
tried to apply their system to the human world and at 
the end of four years of horrible crimes have found out 
that it will not work. The war has shown that there 
are forces in the human soul which cannot be evaluated 

[28] 



HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY 

by any machine psychology. Germany failed to reckon 
with the imponderable things of the human spirit. She 
pitted the machine against the living soul of man and 
now she lies crushed under the very machine in which 
she placed her confidence. 

During the last four months the world has seen the 
most colossal refutation of the much-preached Gospel of 
Efficiency that history thus far has had to record. Before 
the war nearly everybody was applauding Germany for 
her efficiency. Business men were learning her methods 
and preaching her system. Many universities were 
modelling some of their departments at least after hers. 
The Socialist party in America had taken its theory and 
platform almost in toto from her. General philosophy 
was leaning strongly towards a mechanistic rather than 
an organic theory of existence. Science and the labora- 
tory were beginning to dominate the more creative activi- 
ties of our cultural life. Big business was organizing 
industry with a view to efficiency of method and largeness 
of output rather than with a humane interest in the 
effects of that organization on the millions of working 
men and women. In a word, we were following in the 
footsteps of Germany as rapidly as we could. 

Is there not a very important warning for us, then, in 
the present plight of Germany ? Because she mechanized 
her soul through her excessive regard for and practice 
of method and organization, she lost touch with the 
deeper and invisible forces of life and became a domi- 
neering and repressive influence wherever she ruled over 
human beings. But the spirit of man nowhere willingly 
submitted to that rule. The alien races of her own 
empire — even the dark primitive races of her African 
colonies — protested against it. The Allied nations, in the 
face of terrible disasters and unspeakable losses, fought 
on and on and on for more than four interminable years 
in order to destroy it. And now her own people have 
cast it off as something alien to their own deepest nature. 
The machine as an end in itself to which the living 

[29] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

bodies and souls of men must be in subjection has been 
judged and condemned for all the world and for all 
time. By a mighty and tragically costly struggle the 
spirit of man has broken free from the strangle hold of 
mere mechanism and thereby given warning to all 
agencies, political, industrial, and religious, that may 
be tempted in the future to try a similar tyranny. The 
Great War proclaims to this and to all coming generations 
that men can never submit to be treated as things; that 
they are unique centres of spiritual life with a significance 
of their own ; and that all political, economic, and re- 
ligious systems must be tested by the degree to which 
they make possible the realization of unique spiritual 
values in human life. 

Just one hundred years ago (1818) Mary Wollstone- 
craft Shelley gave to the world her powerful but ghastly 
story, "Frankenstein." Its main idea, as one writer has 
described it, is that of the formation and vitalization, 
by a deep student of the secrets of nature, of an adult 
man endowed with the power of thought but lacking a 
soul, who, entering the world thus under unnatural con- 
ditions, becomes the terror of his species, a half-invol- 
untary criminal, and finally an outcast whose sole re- 
source is self-immolation. Since the publication of the 
book many a human creation or fabrication has been 
called a ''Frankenstein." But it remained for Germany, 
one hundred years after the ghastly idea was shaped by 
the strange art of Mrs. Shelley, to give to the world the 
completest illustration of it we have ever had. The leaders 
of Germany for many decades back have labored night 
and day to make their country a model of mechanical or- 
ganization. They have unnaturally suppressed the in- 
dividual soul in the process. They have treated men as 
though they were things and tried to fit them into moulds 
into which nature never intended them to go. It seemed, 
for a time, as though they would succeed and transform 
Germany permanently into a living machine, but in the 
last four years that living machine has become a terror 

[30] 



HOW ORGANIZATION FAILED GERMANY 

to the human species, and after crimes unspeakable has 
finally turned upon its creators and at the present moment 
threatens to tear itself to pieces by the violence of its 
own passions. 

The illustration may not be apt in every detail, but 
it will serve to bring home to us the enormity of the 
crime of which the leaders of Germany have been guilty. 
Inspired by their mastery of method and organization 
they have tried to make a great people into a machine 
for the conquest of the world and the furtherance of 
their own vainglorious ambitions. But the machine has 
failed to achieve the ends they fully expected it to 
achieve, and now its living parts have fallen asunder 
and no one can tell whether they will destroy one an- 
other or succeed in forming themselves into a more or- 
ganic unity. If the fate of Russia should be the fate 
of Germany as well, the blame will lie at the door of 
the men who forced the German people into an un- 
natural system and by distorting human nature for so 
long made it incapable of that democratic organization 
of life which preserves the freedom of the individual 
while at the same time it provides instrumentalities and 
facilities for all kinds of co-operation with his fellows. 
Order is indispensable in human society and human activ- 
ities of all kinds, but it must be an order which main- 
tains and develops the powers and capacities of the in- 
dividual, and because Germany treated order and sys- 
tem as ends in themselves, to which the individual must 
be subjected, she looks out to-day with bewildered soul 
upon the ruins of her great machine and wonders what 
to-morrow will bring forth. 



1 31] 



WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

OF late years many people have come to give a very 
high place in their system of values to education. It 
has seemed to them that in education was to be found the 
solution of most of the perplexing problems of modern so- 
ciety. Some of them have been confidently predicting 
that the church is destined to give way to the school and 
the preacher to the educator. It has been almost univer- 
sally declared that education is the fly-wheel of democ- 
racy. When the records of our training-camps showed a 
larger percentage of illiteracy than we had reckoned on, 
we all felt a distinct twinge of shame and humiliation. 
Educators in general have felt their profession honored 
and its importance recognized by the elevation of one of 
their number to the Presidency of the United States. All 
in all, the hour of the educator and the school seemed to 
have struck, for the value of education was distinctly 
winning an increasing recognition in the whole civilized 
world. 

To all these eager advocates of educational values the 
course of Germany in the last four years must have been 
a painful surprise and disillusionment, for in the recogni- 
tion of the value of education and in the actual working 
out of an educational programme Germany admittedly 
led the modern world. The number of students who 
went to Germany every year from all parts of the world 
to complete their academic education had grown into a 
great host. No other European country could boast of so 
large and constant an influx of young scholars, and no 
other European country exercised so large an influence 
on the educational ideas and systems of other countries as 
Germany did. Many friends of Germany believed that 
education would prove to be the ballast of the Empire, 
and that, if it came to a trial of strength between the 

[32] 



WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

jingoistic Pan-Germans and the educational forces, the 
latter would surely carry the day. Very few students 
of Germany were prepared for the enthusiastic adher- 
ence of the educators to the military and annexationist 
programme of the war party, and their defection has 
raised grave doubts in many minds as to the moraliz- 
ing and steadying value of education. ''If education 
has the value which we have been ascribing to it," they 
ask, "why didn't the education of Germany — the most 
educated country in the world — save her from the kind of 
mentality that produced the war and from the illegal 
and inhuman practices which accompanied her prosecu- 
tion of the war ?" 

The question which is here posed is of immense im- 
portance. To feel the sting of it to the quick we must 
recall to our minds some of the salient facts of the 
German educational system. 

So far as I can find out, Prussia has had a compulsory 
education for a longer period than any other country — 
for about one hundred and sixty years. From the end 
of the sixth year of life until the end of the fourteenth 
year, every child must attend school, and during those 
eight years undivided attention must be given to school 
work. The State controls the whole system from top to 
bottom and sees to it that the regulations of the school 
are lived up to both by teacher and pupil. Nowhere else 
in the world has the discipline of the public school been 
so severe as in Germany, for nowhere else has there 
been as close an affiliation between the military system and 
the educational system. From the moment when the 
child enters the public school until the moment when 
he leaves it he is made to feel the seriousness of the 
educational process, and no weak sentimentality is al- 
lowed to intervene to save him from the hard disci- 
pline of it. 

Moreover, those who teach and administer the school 
discipline have themselves to pass through a most rigor- 
ous training. Germany does not set untrained young girls 

[33] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

of seventeen or eighteen at the important task of teach- 
ing as we do — not even in the elementary grades. She 
does not allow them to teach until their theoretical training 
is over, and that consists of eight or ten years of con- 
tinuous study in a higher school and a training-college. 
The State has no more mercy on the teachers than on the 
children, and drills them so thoroughly in the subjects 
which they are to teach that, when they have to drill 
others, they know how to make their work thorough. It 
probably is true, as some contend, that German teachers 
overdrive their pupils, and that their discipline is too 
severe for timid children, but it cannot be said that the 
educational process is ever superficial, showy, or hasty, as 
it so often is with us. A competent English critic declares 
that "in every direction enterprise, thoroughness, and 
practical common sense characterize the German elemen- 
tary school system." 

The secondary schools are equally praiseworthy, and 
of these there are seven different kinds. Whoever passes 
the final examination in any one of these schools is likely 
to find some special opening into the service of the State, 
the rank of the service being determined by the char- 
acter of the educational training he has had. Scientific 
exactness characterizes the whole system, and the par- 
ents of a child know just what will become of him when 
they make their choice of the secondary school to which 
he is to be sent. The Germans do not train in a haphaz- 
ard way, but provide the kind of education best cal- 
culated to fit the pupil for the place he is to fill and 
the function he is to perform in his after life. 

This is true even more of the technical schools, which 
are praised by every one who has studied them. It is not 
merely the number of these schools that is remarkable, 
but their comprehensiveness as well. Not merely do 
technical colleges turn out each year an army of trained 
directors, engineers, and chemists, equipped with the last 
discovered secret of science and the best methods of in- 
dustry and manufacture, but "technical education is ap- 

[34] 



WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

plied to every occupation in which it is better for a 
workman to have it than to be without it." 

And when we turn to the universities, of which there 
are twenty-two in Germany, it is enough to recall the 
fame of these institutions throughout the world before 
the war began. The great majority of American uni- 
versity teachers have spent one or more years of study 
in German universities. American exchange-professors 
generally brought back from Germany glowing accounts 
of what they had seen and learned. The influence of 
German professors such as Harnack, Paulsen, Eucken, 
Ostwald, Haeckel, Wellhausen, Bousset, and scores of 
others was practically world-wide. All in all, it may be 
said without hesitation that, as an educational influence, 
Germany led the world: her text-books were translated 
into many languages ; her intellectual industry was prodig- 
ious, — she published more books every year than any 
other country; the fame of her professors and colleges 
encircled the globe. 

And yet this educated Germany, this land of bespec- 
tacled scholars, this country of trained investigators and 
profound thinkers, has been guilty of excesses both of 
speech and act that have bewildered her former friends 
all over the world. Her soldiers, who are said by one 
German panegyrist to carry Goethe's "Faust" and other 
pieces of great literature in their pockets, so well edu- 
cated are they, have acted on the average more cruelly 
and brutally than soldiers generally do. Her famous 
professors signed their names to documents which their 
own students in America have read with a stupefying 
surprise, so hysterical and incoherent and unbalanced are 
the statements and arguments contained therein. Ger- 
many's education has failed to keep her sane, rational, and 
fair-minded, or to prevent the growth in the German 
soul of tendencies that have brought her to ruin. 

What is the reason for all this? Is education inade- 
quate to the task of moralizing and civilizing the in- 
stinctive nature of man? Or was there something wrong 

[35] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

with the educational system of Germany in spite of its 
splendid organization? It is the latter question that we 
have before us now. 

From the point of view of a world eager for peace 
and international fellowship, it is plain that in the German 
system there has been too close an alliance between the 
school and the camp. A universal system of state ed- 
ucation, a universal system of military service, and an 
almost universal system of technical training have given 
the State too much power over the mind and life of the 
individual. 

We did not see this as clearly before August, 191 4, 
as we see it now. At that time multitudes of people 
were immensely impressed by the alliance in Germany 
between the school and the army in the service of the 
State. They were beginning to think that Prussia was 
right in regarding her army as part of her educational 
system. They were deeply interested in such comments 
as Dr. Sadler, the distinguished English school-inspector, 
had made concerning the German system: "Side by side 
with the influences of German education are to be traced 
the influences of German military service. The two sets 
of influence interact on one another and intermingle. 
German education impregnates the German army with 
science. The German army predisposes German edu- 
cation to ideas of organization and discipline. Military 
and educational discipline go hand in hand." Many in- 
telligent people, looking at the disorder and incompe- 
tence of democratic countries and feeling that discipline 
was democracy's greatest need, were being drawn more 
and rnore to the discipline, efficiency, obedience, and 
public order which they saw on all sides when they 
travelled in Germany, and which they believed to be the 
outcome of a close alliance between the school and the 
army. 

But the revelation which Germany has made of herself 
during the last four years has brought a revulsion of 

[36] 



WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

feeling and a change of mind. Since discipline, efficiency, 
obedience, and public order are now seen to have been 
only a thin crust over a volcano, since Germany herself 
has confirmed the teaching of Freud, a German psychol- 
ogist, that instincts are not destroyed because they are 
suppressed, but only driven down into the subconscious 
mind to work all kinds of havoc there, we are ready to 
question the moral and social utility of a close alliance be- 
tween the school and the camp. 

It is easy to put one's finger on the weak spot in the 
German educational system. Long ago, Coleridge, under 
the influence of German ideas, defined the purpose of 
education as "to form and train up the people of the 
country to obedient, free, useful, and organizable sub- 
jects, citizens, and patriots, living to the benefit of the 
State and prepared to die in its defence." That defini- 
tion might stand for the German conception of educa- 
tion to-day or at least before the war. ''Organizable 
subjects, living to the benefit of the State and ready to 
die in its defence" — these words are ominous. The 
thought of the individual as a unique human being, need- 
ing education for his own sake as well as in the interests 
of the State, is entirely lacking. The individual in this 
system is not a human unit with mental and spiritual 
dispositions and capacities to be quickened and evoked, 
but a sort of political and economic utility to be organ- 
ized for purposes external to himself. The school is not 
an agency for the development of personalities, of free 
beings each reacting to life in a unique way, but a gov- 
ernmental instrument to. be turned to governmental ac- 
count. External discipline is not something temporary 
to which the young are to be subjected until they are 
capable of self-control, but a permanent aspect of life 
from the cradle to the grave. Technical education is not 
merely a preparation for the earning of a decent liveli- 
hood and the efficient performance of the duties of life, 
but a weapon which the State can use to great advan- 
tage either in trade-competition or in the clash of war. 

[37] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

In a word, the German educational system omits from 
its theory of life the individual soul. It treats the in- 
dividual as though he were only a cog in a machine, a 
servant of the State rather than a free citizen of the 
State, a defender of the State rather than a living soul 
interested in making the most of himself and getting the 
best possible out of his life. If the weakness of de- 
mocracy is to insist on the rights of the individual and 
forget his duties, the weakness of Germany has been 
to insist on the duties and forget the rights. As she 
has cultivated nationalism at the expense of other nations, 
so she has cultivated the State at the expense of the 
individual. 

But a bird can as easily fly with one wing or an oars- 
man row with one oar as a State can remain sound 
and healthy which treats the individual as only a soldier 
in the army or a "hand" in the workshop and not an or- 
ganic part of the body politic. Education has failed 
Germany because she neglected human personality and 
made soldiers rather than citizens. With the model of 
the army and the up-to-date workshop before her mind, 
she trained her children to fit into certain grooves and 
moulds, forgetting that human beings are persons and 
not things, and must achieve self-initiation, self-control, 
and self-expression or else accumulate in their subcon- 
scious mind a mass of suppressed desires which are liable 
to break forth into the wild fury of war or the almost 
equally wild fury of Bolshevist anarchism. Persons must 
be educated to be persons, and not the mere tools of a 
non-moral State. Popular education has, no doubt, im- 
mense military and industrial value, but its primary pur- 
pose is not military or industrial, but human. 

Again, education has failed Germany because it has, 
on its higher levels at least, often lost touch with life and 
thereby become too highly specialized and too doctrinaire. 
Men have become so absorbed in one branch of study 
and so eager to do something new in that branch that 
they have lost all sense of its relative value and all 

[38] 



WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

power to see life as a whole. Instead of estimating its 
value by its contribution to the total life of the com- 
munity, they have been inclined rather to find the chief 
value of life in the opportunity it provides for the pur- 
suit of their specialty. This explains the passion with 
which professors of the same branch of study often 
wrangle over their differing theories. Men of the world 
who look at life from many angles and seek from life 
many values could not so quarrel with one another over 
little things. But the world of the specialist is a small 
world. His one chance for celebrity or preferment lies 
in adding to the knowledge of his department or in 
giving a fresh interpretation of the old knowledge. Under 
these circumstances that which has little real value comes 
to seem of immense importance in his eyes. And when 
a specialist, who has won distinction in some narrow 
specialty, undertakes to pronounce judgment, for ex- 
ample, on national or international politics about which 
he may know very little at all, he often expects to be 
heard with the same deference as when he speaks on 
matters in which he is deeply learned. That surely 
must be the explanation of the mass of political unwisdom 
which German professors poured out on the world in 
the first year or so of the war. Men outside Germany 
who had been trained in German universities, and had 
had immense respect for their teachers, rubbed their 
eyes in astonishment when they read their deliverances 
concerning Germany and her grievances against the rest 
of the world. Famous professors like Harnack and 
Haecket and Ostwald and Eucken wrote with a harsh 
note of dogmatic authority, although it was perfectly 
plain to their old pupils that they had not really sifted 
the evidence at all. 

Such, indeed, is always apt to be the fate of an edu- 
cated class which touches life at too few points and 
seeks from life too few values. Their learning does 
not add to their insight, but becomes an obsession of the 
mind. The older they grow, the more foolish they be- 

[39] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

come, for the impulses, instincts, and sentiments which 
keep the young ahve to the vital things in life grow 
feebler as the years go by and leave the scholar to the 
mercy of his intellectual hobby. 

But German education has been responsible for a 
worse evil than the false judgments in practical matters 
of pedantic professors. I am afraid we owe to Germany, 
for the most part, the doctrinaire spirit which has seized 
upon so many reformers all over the world. It is to the 
doctrinaire spirit that we owe the excesses of the Revolu- 
tion in Russia. It is the doctrinaire spirit that Germany 
is afraid of, now — the spirit of the irreconcilables, the 
bitter-enders, the out-and-outers, the spirit that refuses to 
compromise or to give and take or to live and let live. 
The doctrinaire in theory is what the fanatic is in relig- 
ion and the despot in government. He is like a horse 
with blinders on — he sees straight ahead, but not to either 
side. He is out to win, no matter what his victory may 
cost the rest of the world. Surely if the world ever 
needed the democratic spirit, the spirit of moderation, 
the pragmatic, evolutionary, experimental spirit, it needs it 
now, but that spirit is anathema to the doctrinaire. He is 
sure he is absolutely right, now and for all time, and, be- 
ing absolutely right, he conceives it his duty to rule, even 
though his government should be set up on the ruins of 
all the past. 

That is the spirit that has wrought so much havoc in 
Europe already and now threatens it with more. It is a 
German far more than a Russian or French or British 
product. It grows out of minds that brood over words 
and theories and formulas while they seldom follow the 
organic process of life itself, and such minds have been 
far more numerous in Germany than elsewhere. 

But the deepest reason why education failed to save 
Germany has yet to be stated. While the powers of the 
mind to perceive and associate and conceive and judge 

[40] 



WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

and reason have been systematically cultivated, while the 
dexterities of the hand have been carefully trained to 
manipulate and shape material things into the desired 
forms, the moral and social sensibilities have been com- 
paratively neglected. In a small world like ours, where 
human contacts are inevitably so frequent and where the 
interests and ambitions of classes and nations are so apt 
to cross and conflict, the development and refinement of 
the moral and social sensibilities are increasingly im- 
portant. Unless we are delicately aware of and thought- 
ful for the personalities and rights of others, we are 
sure, as individuals or as classes or as nations, to awaken 
resentment, bitterness, and strife wherever we mingle 
with our kind. Such problems as are perpetually arising 
in the Balkan States and many other similar human situa- 
tions are due, in part at least, not to a lack of intellectual 
and technical education, but to the barbarous condition of 
the moral and social sensibilities of the Balkan races. The 
war, and the jealousies already appearing among the 
newly liberated peoples, show us that moral education is 
indispensable to human welfare. 

That the Germans laid insufficient stress on this aspect 
of education in comparison with others may be easily 
demonstrated. Within the social system of Germany it- 
self three kinds of evidence might be cited, the attitude of 
men to women, the attitude of the officer to the private 
soldier, and the wearisome insistence on the use of exact 
titles in social intercourse. There is no need now to elab- 
orate any of these points. A library of books from 
"Elizabeth and her German Garden" to Mrs. Atherton's 
''White Morning" has familiarized us with the traditional 
attitude of the German man to the German woman. The 
story of the war as told from week to week during the 
last four years has given us detailed evidence of the social 
chasm that has separated the officer from the private and 
of the haughty, unsympathetic, even brutal attitude of 
the former to the latter. Many observers have remarked 
on the superfluity of titles used in Germany, and on how 

[41] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

most people insist on receiving the exact degree of re- 
spect which they deem to be due to their position. 

But writers have not always commented on the in- 
ner meaning of this insistence on titles, class-distinctions, 
and sex-differences. Does it not mean a persistent and 
exaggerated craving for superiority, a lack of sympathy 
for the feelings of social inferiors, and a sense of satis- 
faction in the exercise of power over others? It all 
demonstrates a certain rawness and barbarity of nature 
due to the undeveloped condition of the moral and so- 
cial sensibilities. 

In their relations with foreigners both inside and out- 
side of Germany, the German people have displayed the 
same lack of moral and social perception and sensibility. 
Prof. R. T. Ely, by no means an unsympathetic critic, 
has illustrated and commented keenly on this fact. The 
conception which the German people have come to hold 
concerning their mission as a chosen people has made 
them contemptuous of other races. Their sense of mili- 
tary power has led to a haughty and barbarous rattling 
of the sabre whenever delicate diplomatic situations 
have developed in their relations with other nations. 
Their interest in international law, Prof. Ely points out, 
has seriously declined since they began to think of other 
peoples as their inferiors and their potential enemies. The 
influence of men like Bluntschli and Brentano, who 
worked for a recognition of mutual rights and obliga- 
tions among nations, has very rapidly waned since the 
Pan-Germans began to get the ear of the German public. 

All these considerations go to show that the educational 
system of Germany has not been as perfect as we once 
supposed it to be. The intellectual and technical side 
of it has been supremely efficient, but the most important 
aspect has been neglected. Our greatest human task 
seems to be, not to learn how to control and manipulate 
matter, but how to live together, how to control and 
moralize human nature, and the German educational sys- 
tem has no enlightenment or inspiration for us in this re- 

[42] 



WHY EDUCATION DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

gard. Education failed to save Germany, because the 
German teacher did not see that the training, refining, and 
spirituaHzing of the impulses, instincts, and conative ten- 
dencies of the child is the supreme educational achieve- 
ment. 



[43] 



WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

SINCE ^August, 1914, a great many people have inter- 
preted the war as the supreme illustration of the 
failure of Christianity and its organ, the Christian 
Church. They seemed to think that if only the priests 
and clergy of the three great branches of the Christian 
Church had bestirred themselves and performed their 
function as enthusiastically as other men perform their 
functions in the secular life, all would have been well 
with Germany and the rest of the world. 

With such a view I have only a modicum of sym- 
pathy. It is perfectly true that the Christian Church 
is by no means as intelligent, devoted, and unselfish as 
it ought to be. But, on the other hand, its task is not 
as easy as some would have us think. Human nature 
in the hands of the priest and preacher is not like clay 
in the hands of the potter. It resists most vigorously 
the moralizing process. It is a great mistake to press 
the Biblical simile as far as some do and think of human 
beings as simple, easily influenced and easily guided sheep, 
looking eagerly about for a wise and loving shepherd to 
follow and obey. To take the Biblical simile as literally 
true would be a caricature. Human beings might be 
compared to the carnivorous animals as justly as to inno- 
cent sheep. Whoever undertakes to fashion the life of 
man, morally and spiritually, finds himself in conflict with 
three or four powerful instincts which resist the remak- 
ing which he desires for them. The sex-instinct, the 
instinct of self-assertion, the instinct of pugnacity, and 
the instinct of acquisition are so ancient and deep-seated 
that the purest religion, preached by the most devoted 
and untiring saints and prophets, will never find the re- 
moulding or saving of human beings an easy task. In 
the language of the street, human nature is a tough 

[44] 



WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

proposition, and it must not be taken for granted, when 
a nation goes wrong, that the blame is all or even for 
the most part to be laid at the door of the churches. 

Nevertheless, I think it is possible, in the case of Ger- 
many, to show that a good deal of the blame for the 
state of mind which made the war and its cruel excesses 
possible can be laid at the door of the church. The 
Christian Church is a very imperfect institution in all 
countries ; seldom does it voice the spiritual religion of 
its founder in its purity or its entirety; not infrequently 
it mistakes its mission altogether and transforms itself 
into a social club or a debating society or a semi-political 
party; often it loses all contact with the living present 
and becomes little more than a drowsy echo of the past. 
But, for reasons which I shall try to indicate, the Chris- 
tian Church in Germany, during the last century, in both 
its branches, has been less independent, less inspired with 
a sense of its mission and therefore less spiritual than 
elsewhere. Had the religious spirit which found expres- 
sion in Germany in earlier centuries in the circles of the 
mystics, in the Reformation under Luther, in the Pietist 
movement, and in the Romantic movement of which 
Schleiermacher was the great religious interpreter in the 
early nineteenth century, only continued to find ever-in- 
creasing expression in the Germany of the last seventy- 
five years, the terrible World Tragedy which has just 
come to an end might not have happened — at least, more 
powerful forces in Germany would have worked against 
it, or, to put it somewhat differently, the prevalent state 
of mind in Germany would not have been so susceptible 
to the militaristic and annexationist ambitions of the Gov- 
ernment and the Pan-German party. 

For we must not forget, in this moment of Germany's 
downfall and shame, that in happier days she made great 
contributions to the religious consciousness and the re- 
ligious institutions of the Western world. Away back 
in the fourteenth century Germany gave to the Christian 
world at least three men who have helped to keep the 

[45] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S AlORAL DOWNFALL 

emphasis of Christian people on what is inward and 
vital in religion — I mean the mystics Eckhart, Tauler, 
and the unknown author of the important book called 
''Theologia Germanica." In the sixteenth century we owe 
the initial impulse of the Protestant Reformation to a 
German. No doubt Martin Luther would be a very 
inadequate interpreter of the Protestant spirit and the 
Protestant mind to-day; we are more acutely conscious 
than our Protestant grandfathers were of his shortcom- 
ings as a theological thinker, as a man of social vision, 
and as an exemplar of the saintly life, but for all that 
it was from the deep inward spiritual experience of 
Luther, his heroic courage, his labors as preacher, trans- 
lator, and writer, and his vital, powerful, and, abounding 
personality, that the Protestant movement received its 
first and determining impulse, and to Germany must go 
the great credit for giving birth and being to this great 
leader of the spiritual life of modern peoples. In the 
early seventeenth century Germany again put the world 
into her debt for another contribution to the deepening 
of the inner life of thought and feeling — I refer to the 
activities of the shoemaker mystic Jakob Bohme, from 
whom many modern thinkers have received very fruitful 
suggestions. Later on in the same century there arose 
in Germany a movement whose influence has been as 
wide almost as Christian civilization — the Pietist move- 
ment. Beginning with Spener and Francke and the Uni- 
versity of Plalle, it spread and spread until it touched, 
directly or indirectly, all the deeper spirits of the Prot- 
estant world. It inspired the zeal of Count Zinzendorf 
and the Moravian Brethren; a Moravian brother spoke 
the word that illuminated the mind and focused the will 
of John Wesley; John Wesley founded the Methodist 
Church, which became the fruitful parent of evangelical 
movements in other churches and of reforming zeal in 
circles outside the churches. In a less directly religious 
way it inspired other great leaders. Lessing was moved 
by it to his conception of an eternal gospel. Kant was 

[46] 



WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 



brought up in a Pietist home, and his doctrine of the 
primacy of the practical reason shows distinct traces of 
the influence of Pietism. Herder, Jacobi, and Goethe 
were all touched by it, as may be seen by their emphasis 
on the emotional, mystical, and voluntary element' in 
religion. Schleiermacher is saturated with its spirit, 
although it is accompanied in his case by a much greater 
wealth of intellectual and speculative power than in its 
earlier exemplars. In the nineteenth century, as we shall 
see, this movement distinctly dwindled in Germany as 
compared with the Anglo-Saxon world, but its earliest 
manifestations were in Germany, and, while that kind 
of movement is possible in any Christian land, it is due 
to Germany to say that she has worked fruitfully and 
beneficially to others along this Hne. 

Finally, in the nineteenth century, Germany, through 
some of her great teachers, such as Lotze, Ritschl, Pfleid- 
erer, Eucken, and others, has affected very considerably 
the religious life of the educated classes in France, Eng- 
land, and America. The lofty idealism of these and 
other similar men, unfortunately, has never expressed 
itself in Germany through an organized body as the 
idealism of Martineau, Channing, and Parker has ex- 
pressed itself through the Unitarian churches, but it has 
been a potent influence, nevertheless, both within and 
without Germany. 

We see, then, that if religion and the Church have 
failed Germany in recent decades, it is not because Ger- 
mans have no aptitude for the deeper things in the 
Christian religion. Hence our problem in this lecture is 
this : How did a country with so rich a spiritual heri- 
tage come to get into the state of mind which has re- 
vealed itself so completely both in the national interests 
and ambitions before the war and in the excesses of the 
war itself? For it is plain now to all who have taken 
the trouble to read, let us say, the book called "Hurrah 

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THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 



and Hallelujah" by the Danish writer Prof. J. P. Bang, 
D.D., — a compilation of recent German sermons and 
articles of a religious nature, — that the virus of the New 
Germanism has entered into the clergy as well as into the 
military officers and the university professors. What has 
happened to the Church in Germany, that it should have 
lost its grip on its own spiritual inheritance ? 

I said in my last lecture that one weakness of the edu- 
cational system of Germany could be traced to a too close 
alliance between the school and the camp. Well, the 
weakness of the Church in Germany can be traced to 
a too close alliance between the throne and the altar. In- 
stead of being an organ for the spiritual development of 
individual men and women, the Church has become a 
regular state institution. The Prussian State, reaching 
out in all directions for agencies through which to con- 
trol the people, has gradually seized upon the Church 
and transformed it into an auxiliary to the police force. 

We Americans have nothing in our whole experience 
of church life that would help us to understand the posi- 
tion of the Church in Germany. Here we join our 
churches voluntarily and on profession of our faith ; we 
support them by our voluntary offerings and govern 
them through their organized membership or its elected 
representatives. The State tolerates — we might say, en- 
courages — religious institutions among us by the privileges 
it grants them, but it does not build their churches or pay 
their ministers or exercise any theological censorship or 
assume any official authority whatsoever over them. 

In Germany, however, the position of the Church is 
very different. There each State has its own established 
church, whether Protestant or Catholic, and in some 
States several mutually antagonistic churches are en- 
dowed. The State takes religion completely under its 
wing and asserts its authority in ways unheard of in 
America. In Protestant States the sovereign is summus 
episcopus. In Prussia a considerable part of the salary 
of the clergy comes from the public treasury. Church 

[48] 



WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

rates for the maintenance of public worship are levied on 
entire communities whether the people are Christians or 
free-thinkers, and churches are still built out of municipal 
funds. Not so long ago the highest court in the land 
forced a radical and free-thinking Municipal Council in 
Berlin to contribute ^5,500 towards the enlargement of a 
Berlin church which they had at first refused to give. 
The authority and influence of the Kaiser, W. H. Dawson 
tells us, has had more to do with the building of churches 
in Berlin than the piety and liberality of the people them- 
selves. 

Finally, the State not only holds the purse-strings of 
the Church, but supervises its teaching and public expres- 
sion of opinion. Through the Ministries of Public Wor- 
ship and the Consistories it controls the speech of the 
clergy and brings them to judgment for heretical utter- 
ances. Even as famous a man as Prof. Harnack was 
mildly reprimanded by the Prussian Minister of Public 
Worship some years ago for questioning some dogmas 
of the creed, and since that time two of the most success- 
ful pastors in Germany, Jatho and Traub, have been re- 
moved from their pulpits, by the same authority, on the 
charge of theological heresy. 

Now, what has been the effect of this intimate alli- 
ance between throne and altar? Just what might have 
been expected. The people in general have forsaken the 
Church. Except on the principal church festivals of the 
year — Christmas, Good Friday, Whitsuntide, the Com- 
memoration of the Dead, and Penance Day — the churches 
are practically deserted. Nowhere else in the Protestant 
world are the churches as empty as they are in Germany. 
As compared with the army and the state administrative 
service and the law, the ministry, as a life-calling, is re- 
garded as beneath notice. In other words, the Church 
fails to attract the sons of the so-called better elements in 
society. The middle classes have become quite indifferent 
to the subjective, pietistic elements in Christianity, and 

[49] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

think of the Church only as an agency to keep the masses 
in order. As one distinguished professor said to Prof. 
Ely, *'The Church is good for servant-girls." The work- 
ing-classes are not only indifferent, but violently hostile. 
They say that the Church has allowed itself to become the 
handmaid of the political system and therefore an instru- 
ment of state domination and of dynastic ambition and 
oppression. The Social Democrats, especially in the 
great cities, are loud in their opposition. In their minds 
and lives Christianity has been supplanted by the crassest 
infidelity and materialism. Their leaders are not Jesus 
and Paul and Luther and Schleiermacher, but Biichner 
and Feuerbach and Schopenhauer and Haeckel and other 
materialists and pessimists. In a word, the German 
Protestant Church has lost the deep sympathy and affec- 
tion of the people, and a church without the people is 
like a body without a soul. It is kept alive, so far as it is 
alive at all, only artificially by the support and encourage- 
ment of the Government, but an institution which is not 
the organ of expression for the inner spiritual life of the 
people is not really a Christian church. 

Another consequence of the close alliance of the throne 
and the altar is that the Church has had to align herself 
with the orthodox and reactionary forces of society in 
opposition to the progressive and reforming forces. The 
Christian religion, by its innermost nature, is a progres- 
sive and reforming agency. Its greatest names are the 
names of reformers, men in more or less violent opposi- 
tion to the spirit of their age — Jesus, Paul, St. Augustine, 
St. Francis, Wyclif, Savonarola, Luther, Wesley, Chan- 
ning, Parker, Chalmers. But the German Church has 
driven out that spirit because of its political entangle- 
ments. Its main function is no longer to deepen the 
inner piety of the people or to inspire them with a zeal 
for social betterment, but to preach resignation, obedi- 
ence, and submission to the powers that be. The sins 
which it denounces include not only the old and well 
known sins which the Church has always denounced, but 

[50] 



WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

the new sin of discontent and revolt against the Prussian 
Government. To the old dogmas which it defends vigor- 
ously against the criticism of the universities and the 
scepticism of the Social Democrats it has added the new 
dogma of obedience to Prussian discipline. Originating in 
the free, deeply pious, and earnestly reforming soul of 
the young Luther, the Protestant Church of Germany has 
of late years become only a conservative organ of the 
State, using the inherited authority of religious tradition 
and belief mainly in the interests of public order. And 
while the Roman Catholic Church, because of its connec- 
tion with the Roman Papacy, is freer from state domina- 
tion and more intent on the spiritual side of its func- 
tion, it, too, for the sake of state endowment, has accepted 
a large degree of state control and has lost a good deal 
of the spiritual power it has in America, because of the 
large part it is continually playing in the politics of the 
country through the Central, or Clerical, party. 

But a still more disastrous effect of the alliance of the 
throne and the altar is the growing insistence on the need 
for a national German Christianity. By its very nature 
Christianity is a universal religion. Paul struck its key- 
note long ago when he said : "There is neither Greek nor 
Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scyth- 
ian, bond nor free, but Christ is all and in all." To aban- 
don the universalism of Christianity would be to abandon 
the Christian religion altogether. But that is what many 
German leaders have proposed to do. The national sen- 
timent has become so intense that the idea of racial 
equality in Christ's Kingdom is increasingly repugnant. 
Christianity must be Germanized to suit the taste of the 
modern German patriot. Some of the most prominent 
German professors have in late years pointed out a spirit- 
ual affinity between the fundamental ideas and practices 
of Mohammedanism and the German nature. Others 
have repudiated Christianity as a foreign importation, de- 
plored the fact that the imported religion had dethroned 
the mythology of the old Germans, and called for the 

[51I 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

introduction of a religion that would be more in sympathy 
with the German spirit. The orthodox Church of Ger- 
many has not repudiated the historical doctrines of the 
Christian Church, but it does not represent the real senti- 
ments and aspirations of the people. So far as there is a 
popular religion in Germany, that is, so far as one com- 
mon enthusiastic sentiment is operative in the hearts of 
all, it is inspired by the cult of German nationalism rather 
than by the pietism of Spener and Francke or the idealism 
of Schleiermacher and Ritschl. As German nationalism 
since Bismarck has increasingly found itself in conflict 
with the sentiment and programme of internationalism, 
so it has reacted from the universalism of Christianity and 
come to speak with more and more frequency and em- 
phasis of the good old German God. 

And as a last consequence of the alliance between the 
throne and the altar, the throne has become arrogant and 
really blasphemous through the domination of the 
Church and religion. The whole Christian world has 
been scandalized, during the period of the war, by the 
Kaiser's claim to the most intimate personal relations with 
God. Recall his famous speech to the German people : 
"Remember that you are the chosen people ! The Spirit 
of the Lord has descended on me because I am the Em- 
peror of the Germans, I am the instrument of the 
Almighty. I am his sword, his agent. Woe and death 
to all those who shall oppose my will ! Woe and death to 
those who do not believe in my mission ! Woe and death 
to the cowards ! Let them perish, all the enemies of the 
German people! God demands their destruction, God 
who, by my mouth, bids you to do His will." 

If that speech had been made by some half -crazed 
fanatic of the Middle Ages, it might have been inspired 
by some stirring of the religious consciousness. But in 
the mouth of the Kaiser, a man in touch with every 
phase of modern life, the master of the most educated 
people in Modern Europe, it is nothing short of blas- 
phemy. Such arrogance, such insane boasting, such 

[52] 



WHY THE CHURCH DID NOT SAVE GERMANY 

familiarity with the Almighty, is possible only to a soul 
that has known nothing inwardly of the spirit of Jesus 
Christ. Christianity is synonymous with humility, with 
a sense of one's limitations, with a feeling of dependence 
on God, with a recognition of the filial relation of all 
men to God ; but in this speech we hear only of a false 
tribal God and a false tribal ethics. Through his domi- 
nation of the Church, the organ of the spiritual life of 
the people, the Kaiser's natural arrogance has been im- 
mensely increased. The result has been the building up 
in his soul of a false tribal religion ; through that religion 
he has brought his country into conflict with the rest 
of the world, and by the utter failure of his tribal am- 
bitions he has shown that there is no exclusively Ger- 
man God, but only a universal God, and that the path 
of progress lies, not along tribal and national, but along 
universal and international lines. 

It is impossible for us to realize the appalling desolation 
that must have fallen, in this hour of defeat, upon the 
spirit of many of the German people. Their confidence 
in victory has been so great and their hope for the future 
so high that the sudden realization of their moral and 
military collapse must be bitter as few human experi- 
ences have ever been in the history of man. In such 
hours of sorrow and humiliation the human spirit gener- 
ally has recourse to religion. Men seek in the ideal 
world the strength and hope which they cannot find in 
themselves or their social environment. Religion has 
always flourished most in the hour of deepest need. 

Therein, perhaps, lies the greatest hope for the revival 
in Germany of a more spiritual church and a more in- 
ward religion. The Church of the immediate past can 
hardly endure now that its protector, the dynastic State, 
has vanished. Bitter hardship may be in store in the 
immediate future for a church which has relied so much 
on state aid, but in the end the experience is likely to be 
purifying. The people may turn back from a false tribal 

[53] 



THE CAUSES OF GERMANY'S MORAL DOWNFALL 

religion to the more spiritual religion of their fathers. 
Great spiritual leaders who have been in eclipse in recent 
years may be listened to again. The deeper soul of the 
nation, pent up for the last fifty years under the hard 
crust of militarism, materialism, and orthodox Marxism, 
may break through that crust and utter itself again in a 
genuine piety. Defeat has its values as well as victory, 
and though the men and women, on whom the sorrow 
and shame of defeat have fallen most immediately, may 
never recover a vigorous and hopeful spirit, the younger 
generation may profit by their experience, and shape 
its future towards saner and more spiritual ends. Surely 
that ought to be the hope and desire of their bitterest 
enemies ! 



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